iOS Game Narrated By Shaun Micallef Made By Oz Bureau Of Statistics

So, uh, the ABS put together this slick little city builder, called Run That Town, released it on the App Store — free — and made very little noise about it. Well, noise we didn’t hear, anyway. But it deserves more attention, if only because it looks as polished, if not more so, than most top mobile games.

Did I mention it’s narrated by Shaun Micallef? It’s narrated by Shaun Micallef.

What makes Run This Town unique is that you can punch in your own post code and play virtual urban planner using actual Census data. Heck, you could type in a post code for anywhere, just to satisfy your curiosity.

And it’s not just a glorified way to view statistics; here a some of the features from the app description:

Choose from hundreds of projects for your town — from the practical to the preposterous

Consult the locals to make popular decisions

Read about your exploits in the infamous local paper

It currently has 24 ratings on the Australian App Store, but it’s got a perfect five stars, which bodes well. I’d love to tell you more about it, but having only discovered it myself a few hours ago, I’m just as flabbergasted as you. What I can say is that, from my brief dabbling so far, I’m totally blown away by the quality.

The slickness of the game comes more so from the Graphic Artist that labour'iously created the little men and isometric art. The Developer has put them well together but not optimised it properly. To make it work for the Android, they will have to re-write it entirely which is another (tax payer's money being spend) expense as many in the comments have shown a dislike to. It is strange that organisations do not consider the costs and miss out on a large demographics/market.

However it is quite entertaining... though laggy when run in fast mode. The incidents and the news are a bit to navigate or find, the UI gets a little too busy and unusable at times.

@Rico, without getting into which system is better, Androids are slower in comparison and then running an emulator on top of an already slow system would just kill it. The Apple economy has made developing in Obj-C more profitable than writing code in Java (for Androids).

If Android users would spend as much or more money than iOS developers would then more apps would be created for Androids.